Edward Bulwer-Lytton

When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

There is an old age which has more youth of heart than youth itself!

When stars are in the quiet skies, Then most I pine for thee; Bend on me, then, thy tender eyes, As stars look on the sea!

There is no anguish like an error of which we feel ashamed.

Books are waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.

The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.

There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus—it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

He who has loved often has loved never.

Buy my flowers—O buy—I pray! The blind girl comes from afar; If the earth be as fair as her children say, These flowers her children are!

Fate laughs at probabilities.

Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature: it makes the proud man meek,—the cheerful, sad,—the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy, fall before it. Believe me, you cannot …

The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.

Poverty makes some humble, but more malignant.

Repent!—that is the idlest word in our language.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, …

He is certainly a man who bathes and "lives cleanly," (two especial charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed).

It is not Wisdom, but Ignorance, which teaches men presumption; Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as Knowledge.

The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

Two lives that once part, are as ships that divide When, moment on moment there rushes between The one and the other, a sea,— Ah, never can fall from the days that have been A gleam on the years that shall be.

... if the breast be uneducated, the gift may curse the giver; and he who passes at once from the slave to the freeman may pass as rapidly from the freeman to the ruffian.